Bear Grease: an Indigenous makeover for the classic musical, at the Citadel

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

Call it cosmic inevitability if you will. Or maybe an irresistibly cool idea whose time is overdue. But some shows can’t not be born.

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Bear Grease, the hit Indigenous makeover of that classic 1972 musical that takes us all to the ‘50s, is like that. The inspiration of Henry “Cloud” Andrade and Crystle Lightning, Bear Grease re-launches the Citadel’s Highwire Series Friday after a year’s hiatus. And it arrives on the Maclab stage after three years of touring, 169 shows worth, to sold-out houses on both sides of the border.

And it started here, at the 2021 Edmonton Fringe. That was the year Fringe artistic director Murray Utas invited the husband and wife duo to perform in their hip-hop group LightningCloud on a dedicated Indigenous stage in the festival’s new Pêhonân series. “Hold on!” Andrade told him. “We wrote something new (back then it was called Bannock Grease). And it’s pretty freakin’ hilarious. Can we try that instead?” From Utas, as is his wont, it was a Yes! And tickets for the entire run got snapped up instantly.

Lightning, who’s from the Enoch Cree Nation, recalls the random spark that got ignited one night when she and Andrade were watching the 1978 John Travolta/ Olivia Newton-John movie, one of their faves, on cable. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if we had a show like this?…. There’s no representation out there. And this is so cool, it’s funny,  it’s contemporary. No buckskin, no scenes on the back of a horse! ” In this Lightning speaks from experience. She moved to L.A. age nine with the family and her actress mom, and film and TV started happening for her right away (her first lead role: 3 Ninjas: Knuckle Up).

“An all-Native Grease … we just started laughing,” says Andrade, an Indigenous Mexican (Huichol/ Wixárika) born and raised in L.A. His solo show Evandalism chronicles his hard-ass upbringing there and his rescue from gang culture when he found the arts (or vice versa). “I’ve always been in theatre,” he says, “ever since fourth grade, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and I was Rudolph.” But he drifted away from theatre: “I was kinda type cast, Gangster #3 or Cholo #2.”

But theatre was still on his mind. “And I used music to scratch that itch.” Hiphopera, the marriage of theatre and hip-hop, brought him back, he says. And he started writing, too.

On the fateful night of Grease on cable, brainstorming instantly began. Andrade is, after all, an award-winning MC, and holds the Guinness record for “longest freestyle rap,” a mind-boggling 18 hours. Summer Nights, the Danny/Sandy duet that’s permanently lodged in your brain, got a twist, with the Indigenous slang for making out, hooking up. You know the tune, I know you do. “Summer snaggin’, had me a blast; summer snaggin’, happened so fast…. I met a girl, she’s Enoch Cree. I met a boy who’s not related to me.”

“We wrote the whole song that night,” Andrade says. And the pandemic lockdown was the chance to amplify the 35-minute Fringe edition of Bear Grease. “We wrote in all the missing songs.” Some are in the spirit of Grease parodies, with new, Indigenized lyrics (“meet me at the powwow, you’re the one that I want”); some are from LightningCloud albums. “We knew the audience was going to want ‘something Grease’,” as he puts it. “Then  we started rapping.”

“We put in some hip-hop while still keeping the ‘50s flavour,” says Lightning, whose theatre training at the Beverly Hills Playhouse was of the full-on classical stripe. “That was important to us. We kept the melody and feel of it, the vibe, carved out the words, added our own, added some Native slang….”

Henry “Cloud” Andrade (centre) and the touring cast of Bear Grease, 2023. Photo by KGE Photography

The production reflects that, says Lightning, who played Sandy in much of the Bear Grease touring so far, but removed herself from the cast after show #140 to pass the torch and make her directing debut (Andrade, who was Danny, is the music director and stage manager). “The poodle skirts are still A-line. But instead of a poodle, there’s a bear and ribbons. The guys are still wearing black leather, but now they have beautiful bead-work medallions and kookum scarves. Sometimes they wear moccasins instead of Chuck Taylors….”

Crystle LIghtning and Henry “Cloud” Andrade in the touring Bear Grease, 2023. Photo by KGE Photography.

The ensemble, all Indigenous, are from  is from actors in the diverse, all-Indigenous cast bring with them their own localized traditions and cultural flavours. New to the current cast are three performers, Justin Giehm and Raven Bright, both Dene Navajo from New Mexico, as Sonny and Roger respectively, and Tesla Wolfe as Frenchie. And everywhere Bear Grease goes, “we try to have local references,” Lightning say. “What is the local thing?” In Treaty 6 territory, for example, the show is threaded with Cree here and there, and place names.   

Why take on Grease, instead of, say, any other quintessential American musical? Andrade, amused, remembers playing Sonny in a high school Grease. Lightning says her teenage parents’ first date was watching Grease at the Enoch drive-in. “And nine months later I was born!”

“I wasn’t a rapper at first,” she says. “I started out as DJ, working Hollywood clubs.” She and Andrade met in L.A., at a magazine photo shoot, and they fell in love.  “He asked me to DJ for him for a couple of shows, and then for a 12-day tour…” And then, as she started rapping onstage with Andrade, LightningCloud was born, “first one song, then another, and soon we’re a full-on hip-hop group.” Albums and awards, and touring on both sides of the border, ensued.

The Lightning and Andrade love story gets a dramatic boost at River Cree. Lightning is seven months pregnant and onstage there when her water breaks, which pretty much redefines the ‘actor’s nightmare’. And while she’s at the Misericordia Hospital for the birth of their son, filmmaker Michelle Latimer calls to offer her “a delicious starring role” in the CBC Trickster series.  And she won a Canadian Screen Award as best actress in a drama series for her work. “When my son was born, my world was opened up to roles I’d always dreamed of,” she says.

The couple moved from L.A. to Edmonton, Lightning’s home turf. “Even when I was just visiting (with a touring hip-hop improv group called Free Daps, Orlando-based) I could see that this is a theatre town,” says Andrade. “A town that embraces the performing arts.”

And Bear Grease isn’t just a celebration of Indigenous cultures married to a much-loved musical, as Lightning muses. It’s a crucial “what-if?” proposition, too. After all, Grease conjures an era, the ‘50s, when “opportunities (for Indigenous artists) were non-existent. And they still kind of are…. We have to create for ourselves; no one’s knocking on our door.”

“What if we’d gotten this opportunity before?” she asks. “What if colonization had never happened? Would we have been out there like Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta.”

“But because our reality was a bit different, we had to re-create in a parallel universe….” she says. There are references to darker subjects (residential schools), but the show takes a more oblique route to understanding. “It’s a comedy! And we want everyone to be entertained and have fun.”

Ah, with more to come, says Lightning. “What about Bearspray? Or Rez Side Story?.” Stay tuned.

PREVIEW

Bear Grease

Theatre: LightningCloud in the Citadel Highwire Series

Created by: Henry “Cloud” Andrade and Crystle Lightning

Directed by: Crystle Lightning

Starring: Raven Bright, Kean Buffalo, Bryce Morin, Melody McArthur, Tammy Rae, Teneil Whiskeyjack, Rodney McLeod, Skylene Gladue, Justin Giehm, Tesla Wolfe

Running: Oct. 17 to 27

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820